NY times
January 27, 2002
Death by Stoning
By RICHARD DOWDEN
ufiyatu Huseini sits on the earth floor of a tiny mud hut breast-feeding her
10-month-old daughter, Adama, and occasionally waving away flies that swarm
around the child's eyes and mouth. She says she is 35, but her wizened face and
broken brown teeth make her look considerably older. This ordinary woman, as
poor as any in this impoverished region of northern Nigeria, recently became
horribly extraordinary: last June, an Islamic court in Sokoto, the regional
capital, sentenced her to death by stoning for committing adultery. The
evidence is the child she now feeds. The judge mandated that the sentence be
carried out as soon as Adama is weaned.

Sufiya, as the woman is known, has appealed the judgment, and a hearing is
scheduled for the middle of March. But there is a good chance that the appeal
will not save her. The recent introduction of the full sharia -- strict Islamic
rule of law backed up by harsh punishments -- in 10 of Nigeria's 12 northern
states is a highly political issue in the region, whose population is largely
Islamic and whose courts are strongly influenced by the militant Islamists who
have come to wield significant power.

Sufiya lives in Tungar Tudu, a village some 20 miles from Sokoto, which in the
19th century was the capital of an extensive African Islamic empire and is now
a sleepy, poverty-stricken backwater. You reach the village by a dusty track
that leads through arid fields of shriveled corn and millet. The 3,000 or so
people who live in the mud-and-straw homes grow only enough to survive on.

Water comes from an old-fashioned well served by a bucket made from
long-discarded tire tubing -- one of the only signs of modernity in the
village. Last year, 40 years after Nigeria achieved independence from Britain,
the federal government provided the first services to Tungar Tudu, building a
primary school and a dispensary.

The only furnishings in Sufiya's hut are three plastic mats. With her are her
blind father and a neighbor whose hands have been reduced to gnarled stumps by
leprosy. Speaking in Hausa, the local language, Sufiya explains through an
interpreter that last year she divorced her husband, which is allowable under
Islamic law, because he could not support her. She returned to her father's
house with her two children. But then, she says, a 60-year-old man named Yakubu
Abubakar began to show interest in her. ''He used fetish charms to woo me, but
he did not succeed,'' she says. As she goes on to tell the story, she grows
more solemn. ''One day I was in the bush, and he ambushed me and forced me.

That happened four times. I am telling you as I am telling God. I suddenly
found myself pregnant. I was embarrassed for what this would do to me and to my
family.''
Not long after her pregnancy began to show, the police arrived and interrogated
her. She says she has no idea who told them. Sufiya, who is illiterate, and
Abubakar were then taken to the police station in Sokoto, where they confessed
to having sex. At the time, Sufiya did not say that she had been raped. ''He
said he loved me and he could not suppress his feelings for me,'' she says of
Abubakar. ''He promised to take care of the child. My father suggested that he
should marry me, and he agreed.''
Had this happened before the introduction of the full sharia law, the families
would have come to an arrangement supported by the village. Abubakar would have
had to care for Sufiya and her child but not necessarily marry her. But now it
is out of their hands. When it came to the court hearing last June, Abubakar
denied everything.

Under the most common interpretation of Islamic law, adultery can be proved
only if someone confesses to it, or if the act is seen by four male witnesses.

But the mainly Muslim northern states of Nigeria have by and large adopted the
Maliki tradition, the strictest interpretation of the Koran, in which pregnancy
alone is sufficient evidence of adultery. Sex between two unmarried people is
punished by beatings, but the penalty for adultery, if one partner is or has
been married, is death. Lacking witnesses to the act, Abubakar was acquitted.

But on the evidence of Sufiya's pregnancy, Judge Muhammad Bello Sanyinlawal
sentenced her to death by stoning. ''I was shattered when the judge said
that,'' she says. ''I never thought there would be such a punishment.''
Immediately after the sentencing, Sufiya ran away from Tungar Tudu, but she was
eventually caught and taken back to the village, where she is allowed to remain
with her family until her appeal is heard. While no one in Tungar Tudu will
speak out publicly for fear of retribution, the villagers appear to support
her; if they did not, they would have expelled her. Instead, it is Abubakar who
has left the village and gone into hiding.

Initially, Sufiya said that the law was not justly applied because she had been
raped by Abubakar. Earlier this month, however, Sufiya and her lawyers -- who
are being paid by Baobab, a national women's support group financed by the Ford
and MacArthur Foundations -- began mounting a different defense, claiming that
Adama was not fathered by Abubakar but is in fact the daughter of Sufiya's
former husband. When asked to explain the change in her story, one of Sufiya's
lawyers, Abdulkadir Imam, said that her original statement had been made under
duress and without legal representation. ''She did not understand the nature
and consequence of the offense she was charged with nor the questions she was
asked,'' he said.
For the last millennium, the area that became Nigeria in 1906 has been plagued
by tensions between the Islamic north and the Christian and animist south. When
the British took over what is now northern Nigeria at the end of the 19th
century, they retained Islamic law but gradually removed the harsher
punishments. In 1960, a new Western-style penal code, which included some
references to Islamic law, was introduced in the north.

That remained the system until last year, when one after another, the newly
elected state governments of the north reintroduced the full sharia, some
enthusiastically, others under pressure from militant Islamists. By the end of
this year, it is very likely that between one-third and one-half of Nigeria's
120 million people (census information is notoriously suspect here) will find
themselves living under a judicial system with which Mullah Muhammad Omar, the
ousted Taliban leader, would find little to quibble.

Paradoxically, none of this would have been possible if not for the end of
military rule two years ago. Since the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo
in 1999, 10 of Nigeria's northern states have taken advantage of a loosening of
federal control and the advent of democratic freedoms to reintroduce the full
sharia. Another state is expected to introduce it, and Niger has amended the
1960 law to provide for sharia criminal law.

While there is little evidence of Taliban-style Islamic militancy on the
streets of Sokoto, in other northern states churches have been burned and
Christian women have been attacked for not covering their heads. Separate buses
and taxis have been allocated for women, and the streets are now patrolled by
quasi-official Islamic enforcers, the Hisbah, who do not always distinguish
between Muslims and non-Muslims. Non-Muslims, in theory, are exempt from sharia
law.

In recent months, several people in northern Nigeria have been lashed in public
for petty theft, drinking alcohol or sexual offenses that did not involve
adultery. In July, a young man in Sokoto had his right hand amputated for
stealing a goat. (The amputation was carried out under anesthesia by a
qualified surgeon, and the man was given 50,000 Naira -- $450 -- by the state
government ''to start a new life.'') There have been two other amputations and
numerous lashings elsewhere in the northern states. In one well-publicized
case, a 17-year-old girl in Zamfara State was given 100 lashes in public with a
leather whip for having premarital sex. In Katsina State, a man has been
sentenced to have his right eye removed in retribution for blinding another man
in an assault.

Moderate Muslims in the region, along with international human rights monitors,
worry that strict sharia law will become more widespread as politicians compete
to exploit public enthusiasm for law and order. The prospect of swift and harsh
punishment appeals to many in the north, where the police are seen as
ineffective and corrupt. And the citizens of northern Nigeria, most of whom are
illiterate peasants who have never enjoyed political or civil rights, tend to
believe what they are told by the ruling elite -- Sufiya and her father, for
instance, agree that stoning is the correct punishment for adultery.

All of this makes northern Nigeria fertile ground for political opportunists.

Ahmed Sani, the governor of Zamfara State, in northwestern Nigeria, openly
admits that under the military regime he used his position with the central
bank to amass a fortune. After 1999, he leveraged his wealth to buy his way,
quite literally, to the governorship. (Votes in Nigeria's new democracy are
cheap, and it is accepted practice that candidates pay off local chiefs, who
then deliver their people.) After his election, Sani then turned to Islam to
cement his base among locals and to position himself for the next election. He
now uses his newly acquired Islamic credentials to build support among the
faithful and to demonize his opponents.

Many Muslim leaders oppose the wholesale adoption of strict sharia, fearing
that it will ultimately be rejected by a population in which support is wider
than it is deep. They would prefer that it be voted upon in a referendum by the
people and not imposed by a legislature or governor. But the moderate leaders
find it next to impossible to stand up to politicians like Sani without
appearing to be un-Islamic.
Aliyu Abubakar Sanyinna, the attorney general of Sokoto State, relaxes in a
grandiose armchair under gently turning fans in his home. He dispenses a
mixture of theology and governance that chills with its casual certainties and
its disregard for political and human implications. With his two young
daughters playing at his feet, he speculates on how a stoning might be carried
out: ''They will dig a pit and put the convicted person in it so that he or she
cannot escape. Or he or she will be tied to a tree or a pillar. There will be
special people trained for this, as many as possible, but the number will be
determined by the court.''
How big should the stones be?

''Not big ones, moderate-size ones -- like this.'' He holds up a fist. He says
that he would be happy to cast the first stone if asked to by the court.

He describes adultery as the second most serious crime under Islamic law, the
first being insulting Allah. ''Adultery is more serious than murder,'' he says.

''Society is injured by her act. The danger is that it will teach other people
to do the same thing.'' It is a curious statement, coming from an official in a
country -- including the Muslim north -- where it is common for married men to
boast of their numerous girlfriends.

Sanyinna attributes a recent fall in crime to the introduction of the sharia
and justifies the harshness of the punishments as an extension of God's law. He
adds that southern Christians frequently kill thieves by burning tires around
their necks (though he acknowledges that it is not sanctioned by the
government). Also, Sanyinna notes, the federal government in Abuja has agreed
to relinquish power to the states and therefore should not interfere with this
case.

eneath a copy of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights taped to his
office wall, Mansur Ibrahim Sa'id, dean of the law faculty at Dan Fodio
University in Sokoto, says that he, too, would take part in the stoning if
asked to by the court. ''What can I do?'' he asks. ''If the state calls on
someone to do his duty and carry out a law that has been properly passed, he
must do it. If she is stoned to death, she is content. God has said that is the
way she should go because she has broken his law. And those stoning her will be
happy because they are carrying out God's will.''
Sa'id was a member of the committee that drafted Sokoto's new legal code. Like
Sanyinna, he makes the case against Sufiya with something less than academic
detachment. Adultery, he says, is ''an abomination abhorred by God and
society'' because of the example it gives and because it creates bastards who
will be rejected by society. He says that Sufiya's pregnancy constitutes
perfect proof of her guilt.

Asked whether stipulations in the United Nations Charter against cruel,
degrading and inhuman treatment conflict with amputations and stonings, Sa'id
replies: ''You have to decide what amounts to cruelty and take into account the
religious background. What yardstick are you using? You have to know if the
people who use this law see it as cruel and inhuman.''
And how does the theft of a goat compare with the notorious theft of millions
of dollars of public funds by senior military officers and officials in
previous regimes? Sa'id says that the officials were guilty of embezzlement, a
lesser crime than theft. Under sharia, he says, embezzlement does not merit
severe punishments like amputation.

There are Islamic scholars in Nigeria who oppose the verdict in Sufiya's case.

Mohammed Ladan, a lecturer in law at Ahmadu Bello University at Zaria, called
it a misapplication of the sharia because the authority of the court was weak
and the incident lacked the four witnesses required by Koranic law. Beyond
that, there are serious questions about whether the federal government will
allow the execution to go ahead.

If Sufiya's appeal is rejected in the regional court of appeal, which is also a
sharia court, it will end up in Nigeria's supreme court, whose judges will face
a tough political choice. If they turn down the appeal, they will certainly
upset the monitors who shape international opinion of Nigeria's federal
government, and their decision will be disconcerting to those in the south who
are troubled by the extent of sharia rule in the north, where many southerners
now live. But if they uphold the appeal, they will appear to be overruling
Islamic law, thereby offending the growing numbers of galvanized Muslim
northerners.

Nigeria's constitution forbids the establishment of any religion at the
national or state level. But those in favor of sharia argue that a precedent
has been set by the acceptance of civil aspects of sharia law in the north for
a century. Last month, Nigeria's justice minister, Bola Ige, said that the
sentence of stoning was ''harsh and crude'' and promised that ''this type of
thing will not happen in Nigeria in 2002.'' (He was assassinated in late
December; the murder is not believed to be associated with this case.)

President Obasanjo has said nothing about the case so far and has barely
commented upon the reintroduction of sharia. In one instance, when asked about
sharia, the president said simply that he hoped that the problem would go away.
That could be wishful thinking. ''For a political leader to advocate its
abolition would be political suicide,'' says Prof. Ruud Peters of the
University of Amsterdam, who just completed a study on the implementation of
sharia in Nigeria. He points out that in Pakistan and Libya, which have each
made sharia the national law, amputations and stonings are never imposed, even
though they are carried on the statute books. In northern Nigeria, he says,
sharia law has been drafted differently, and sloppily, for each state. He urges
the drafting of laws that would not only make the law consistent from state to
state but would also emphasize restrictions and limitations that make the
application of severe Koranic punishments more difficult.
Waiting in her father's hut for the day when she will be either spared or
stoned, Sufiya is oblivious to these subtleties and to the growing
international significance of her case. She plainly states that it is not
sharia law she is fighting; she simply wants to receive justice. ''As a
Muslim,'' she says, ''I know the laws of God are being implemented.'' She looks
down for a moment at Adama nursing at her breast, then finishes her thought.

''But the law must be fair.''
Richard Dowden covers Africa for The Independent and The Economist.